Inciteful

Inciteful helps researchers find literature by working from the citation graph instead of keywords. Keyword search finds papers that use your words; the citation graph finds the papers a field actually cites and builds on, including work that is worded differently.

What it does

• Paper Discovery: start from one or more seed papers. Inciteful builds the citation network around them and ranks the most similar papers, the most important papers, reviews and recent work, so you can snowball outward in a few clicks.
• Literature Connector: give it two papers and it shows the citation paths and bridge papers that connect them, which is useful when joining two fields or lines of work.
• Zotero plugin: start an Inciteful search from the papers already in your Zotero library.
• MCP server: a free, no-login remote MCP server lets Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other assistants use the citation graph directly: similar papers, citation networks, paths between papers, open-access full text from PubMed Central, and BibTeX/RIS export.

Data

Paper metadata and citations come from OpenAlex (CC0), across all fields. Because it uses citation metadata rather than full text, coverage does not depend on publisher full-text access.

Access

Free, with no account. Results can be exported to BibTeX and RIS.

Open source

The web application and Zotero plugin are AGPL-3.0, and the MCP server is MIT. The hosted graph service that builds and ranks the networks is not part of these repositories.